It's awesome that a judge apparently created a new crime because he deicided that the legislature was wrong.

This isn't going to make any difference.

The EU "Right to Privacy" and indeed all the human rights encoded in the relevant document are so riddled with exceptions that you can drive a bus through them. The fact that any government lost at all is amazing and surely the result of incompetent lawyering. From the text:

There shall be no interference by a public authority with the exercise of this right except such as is in accordance with the law and is necessary in a democratic society in the interests of national security, public safety or the economic well-being of the country, for the prevention of disorder or crime, for the protection of health or morals, or for the protection of the rights and freedoms of others.

The national security exception by itself seems enough to allow nearly anything, but then they add public safety and economic well being on top! In fact every reason a government might have for engaging in surveillance is covered, which cannot be an accident.

But anyway, GCHQ is not about to suddenly discover that it cares about these things. It's been obvious since the start that the 5 Eyes agencies perceive themselves as being entirely outside ordinary democratic constraints, unfortunately, that perception is largely true as senior ministers think real life is like an episode of 24 and gives them essentially blanket immunity to do whatever they like.

FWIW, grid tie solar is typically designed in a way that it doesn't work during local outages (with the intent of preventing your solar energy from backfeeding into the grid and potentially killing or injuring line workers). That's not to say that it MUST be designed in such a manner (transfer switches can solve the problem) but that it typically is.

Yes, I had the same experience the few times I've used Uber. The drivers always seem happy. They don't feel like they're being exploited and often feel it was an upgrade on what they were previously doing. The flexibility comes up a lot too.

Whilst it's just anecdotes, that would still seem to be a serious problem for the "Uber is exploiting the poor proles" camp.

Having the truck paid off is not really an argument - if you sold your truck you could probably fund bus tickets for the rest of your life. Also, what about insurance? I'd guess that's in the same order of magnitude as the bus fare. I can fully understand not wanting to take the bus, and in your case it doesn't really sound feasible. I am driving a car to work every day even though it only saves me only about 20min - simply because public transport stresses me out while driving a car is relaxing for me. But money is usually not a good argument for doing that, at least for people living in urban areas with good public transport.

That doesn't change the fact that in most situations cars are more convenient and get you faster to your destination. Do you think that if there was only one model, and everybody could get that for free, people would drive less?

A car usually costs you several hundred dollars/euros per month. A ticket for public transportation is usually a fraction of that, maybe 100 dollar/euro. Why would you think that reducing that cost would make a significant difference?

Filler appendices and introduction to the problem? What about over 30 pages of autopromo?
Testimonials. Reviews. Forewords By Famous People I'd Never Heard About. Award nominations. Blurbs. Thanks to Famous People for Help.

If I see the book needs so much space to convince the reader it's any good, it means the actual content definitely isn't good enough to sell the book.

Over 15 years ago Segfault.org reported their classic: "What If Linus Torvalds Gets Hit By A Bus?" - An Empirical Study. If we learned anything from that, it's that we also have to watch out for muffins.

Nah, the kind of companies they shop at are the kind of corps that dodge the tax.

Yes, how did the BBC ever dare to compete with Commodore, Apple, etc back in the 1980's. What imperialists!

Signed /A guy who learned programming on a BBC Micro

Same way it works for banks. In other words, it doesn't, but it makes them into awfully convenient scapegoats who can be blamed for any social ill on the grounds that "they could have stopped it but didn't because they're all greedy capitalists".

It was inevitable that things would go this way the moment encryption started getting good. As NSA/GCHQ are now much more limited in what they can see, and privacy advocates are trying to stop them getting more power, the obvious 'solution' is to outsource the costs to the private sector. The advantage is the government can then never screw up, except by being insufficiently aggressive with them. It's a lose/lose situation for anyone who runs a communications system.

And the only solution to THAT is end to end crypto so not even the provider can read the messages. Hence the UK's sudden interest in banning such systems entirely.

The phrase "they hate us for our freedom" is finally true.

Do you happen to work for RIAA? They tend to sue people for causing them losses like these.

DRY the containment :) Though that changes the concentration.